1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a method and system for collection, volume reduction, transportation, and tracking of scrap tires.
2. Description of the Related Art
Generally, scrap tire generation in industrialized countries is approximately one passenger car tire equivalent per population and year. It is estimated that 2 to 3 billion scrap tires are stockpiled in illegal or abandoned piles throughout the U.S. The most obvious hazard associated with the uncontrolled disposal and accumulation of large amounts of tires outdoors is the potential for large fires that are extremely detrimental to the environment. Once a large pile of tires catches fire, it is very hard, if not impossible, to extinguish. In some instances, large tire piles have been burning for several months with the fumes being visible for many miles. Also, it has been found that air and soil pollution is even worse if attempts are made to extinguish the fire with foam or water. For this reason, scrap tire fires are often allowed to bum out in a more or less controlled manner until the entire pile is exhausted.
A second problem often caused by illegal tire piles involves disease carrying mosquitoes, which tend to breed in great numbers in the protected water puddles which form in the inside of the tires. Outbreaks of diseases like Encephalitis, Rocky Mountain Fever, West Nile Fever or Malaria have been reported around large tire piles.
Scrap tires are illegally dumped for several reasons: poor enforcement of anti-littering and anti-dumping laws; lack of easily available alternatives; and tire jockeys illegally dumping tires rather than paying tip fees. There is virtually no way of identifying the discarded tires as to where they originated from, and who is at fault.
Most of used tires are generated at retail tire outlets, where the scrap tires are typically collected and transported to various locations: tire dump sites, transfer stations, shredding facilities, utility boilers, cement kilns and other locations. There have been some conventional solutions for addressing the issues of economics of scrap tires handling and transportation, for example U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,590,594; 5,676,320; 6,098,531; 6,315,223. These solutions provide either baling a large amount of tires at a time or shredding them in order to reduce their cubic volume, thereby providing a more economic commodity for transportation. (Transportation costs are a major component of the total costs in the scrap tire collection business.) There are several drawbacks with these methods. The biggest problem associated with baling or shredding tires is that large amounts of tires have to be collected and stored before a mobile processing unit can arrive on site. Also, bales of tires are very heavy and require forklifts for handling (which are not a standard equipment at tire outlets). Shredding the tires produces a lot of dust that is very flammable, requires a front loading truck for handling the shreds and not every location described above will accept pre-shredded tires.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,809,875 describes an apparatus for crushing vehicle wheels. A frame includes three radially dispersed rectangular tube beams each mounting a hydraulic cylinder and a crushing head which converge and operate radially to deform a scrap supported at the center of the frame in order to separate the steel rim of the wheel from the surrounding casing. After removing the steel rim, the tire will return to its original shape. Accordingly, this patent does not teach compacting tires to be used in recycling and maintaining the compacted tires in a compacted form.
It is desirable to provide a method and system for individual tire recycling and tracking.
The invention relates to a method and system for recycling individual scrap tires by crushing individual tires. The method eliminates or reduces the costs associated with conventional methods of storing, handling, and transporting the scrap tires. The invention also provides a method of tracking the scrap tires on the way from the scrap tire generator to the end destination by marking the scrap tires with unique numbers that will be traceable, identifying the origin of the scrap tire, thereby preventing accumulation of illegal tire dumps (disposal sites).
The method of the present invention for handling scrap tires, includes a step of providing a compacting apparatus to a scrap tire generator, such as a tire retailer. Before compacting the tires, the tire can be marked with a unique identifier assigned to every tire generator. By marking the scrap tires with a unique identifier, the scrap tires can be tracked on their way to the final destination. The compacting apparatus provides volume reduction of the scrap tires individually into a form that can have a reduction of at least fifty percent of original cubic volume. The tires can be pinched to maintain the compacted tire in the compacted form and prevent the compacted tire from regaining its original shape. The compacted scrap tires can be accumulated inside a tire collection enclosure, such as a trailer or dumpster. The collected tires can be transported with much more weight efficient loads of the tires to a transfer station, a recycling facility, or an end user.